Cheney's policies come back to bite us in the ass.

Juan Cole has a reveals what Andrew Sullivan called an "uncomfortable truth" on his blog today weith regard to the US condemnation of the video released of the US soldier captured in Afghanistan:

"But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won't take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney.

After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say substantial skepticism.

In fact, as I was reminded by a former ambassador, the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Armitage gutting of US conformance with the Geneva Conventions really makes it difficult for Washington credibly to complain about the treatment of any of our captured soldiers. The Taliban could hold the soldier hostage forever if they follow the principle put forward by Sen. Lindsey Graham. They could (God forbid) put him in stress positions naked and threaten to release the pictures to his family, and they would have done nothing that Rumsfeld's Pentagon had not done routinely and on a vast scale.

The US refusal to so much as investigate American officials implicated in torture and breaking international law also does not help us gain credibility on seeing to it that those who mistreat our troops are tried on those charges. We even have Dick Cheney defending waterboarding, for which Japanese generals were tried and executed after WW II. It is disgusting.

You obey the Geneva Conventions and the rest of international law on the treatment of captives because it gives you the moral high ground with regard to the treatment of our troops. Not doing so endangers every single one of our men and women in uniform. The chickenhawks who called such international agreements 'quaint' and outmoded should be drafted and sent to the front."

More on how Bush admin tortured their way to Iraq.

More evidence, now from Colin Powell's aide, that US tortured to find link between AQ and Iraq.

Rachel Maddow 'traced the torture trail' to Iraq on Thursday, here is the clip and transcript.

The reason we went to war in Iraq is dead; this man is the Bush admin in a nutshell.

This needs to be the lead story and on the front page of every news source around. This man's story brings out almost every single one of the most unbelievably messed up things the Bush admin did: war in Iraq, torture, rendition, Guantanamo.

Rendition? Torture? Proof that torture yields bad intell? Check, check and check.
After captured in 2001, Ibn al Sheikh al Libi was sent to Egypt via rendition, and after being almost buried alive for 17 hours, made up a story about Iraq and Al Qaeda and chemical weapons. (See Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.)

War in Iraq? Check:
Ibn al Sheikh al Libi is basically the reason we went to war in Iraq. The FALSE intelligence he coughed up, no pun intended, during one of Cheney's torture sessions was the only 'link' the admin had between Iraq and AQ: that Iraq provided chemical weapons training to AQ (bullshit). It is the same story Colin Powell brought before the UN.

Guantanamo? Worse, Libya.
After being returned to CIA custody in 2004 after his brief underground tour of Egypt, al Libi was mysteriously missing from the group of lucky guys sent to vacation in Cuba; the Post article I linked to above quotes Tom Malinowski of HRW, "I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration."

Boo Hoo Bybee; Spare me the sob stories.

I have sooooo almost canceled my Wash Post subscription in the past year.

I am going to start to keep a list of all their crap articles and opeds from now on. This is the first entry:

They ran the most idiotic apologist article on the FRONT PAGE on Friday about how Jay Bybee "feels bad" about authorizing torture.

Boo Hoo.

First of all, there are so many other important and interesting angles to this article. Like an oped from an actual participant - Ali Soufad - in the NYtimes last week. Like the countless articles and reports on what the memos said and why they said it when they did.

Second of all, the actual article reveals that he might not actually feel bad, as he may or may not have kind of sort of maybe not really sure expressed this to maybe one or two people.

So please, Wash Post, spare me the sob stories about the torture team.

I know, we'll torture our way into Iraq.

Frank Rich has a great oped in Sunday's NYTimes on the Bush admin's torture campaign. He does a nice job of showing how and why the admin turned to torture when it did - to try to come up with a link between AQ and Iraq to bolster the sale of the Iraq war to the public.

The Senate Armed Services Committee (which includes Lindsay Graham, John McCain and torture lover Joe Lieberman) released findgins to support this claim in their report last week. Quoting Maj. Paul Burney: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between AQ and Iraq and we were not being successful."

It's just to much of a coincidence how the dates line up: when torture memos were written, when Zubaydah and Khalid ere tortured, when the Bush admin was int heir most intense salesman stage - ie Cheney false statements on Meet the Press. (His memorable appearance was only a month of Bybee's memo.)

Also torture was used even after traditional methods (not torture) had been effective in revealing certain details about AQ...but that wasn't enough for the admin in their struggle to use a link between AQ and Iraq to justify their already planned war on that country.

Straight from the horse's mouth.

An oped in the NYTimes today from a former FBI supervisory agent about the ineffectiveness of torture and the efficacy of other methods of gaining intelligence. (And he has firsthand evidence on Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.)

Cheney is a selfish hypocrite. (Yes, most of us have known this for a while, but now it should be clear to all.)

Hasn't Cheney's main argument always been that if you release info about torture the 'terrorists' will have an advantage and therefore the US will be less safe????

And we all know Dick cares about America before anything else...right??

Curious that he now advocates declassifying ALL intelligence on torture.

Why oh why could #1 patriot do this to his beloved country? Because this will SERVE to prove HIS point, HIS vision HIS argument (HIS book...) which he values over the US.

(Cheney states the release of this info is necessary to 'prove torture worked'...I am pretty sure that the fact that Zubaydah and KSM (Khalid Sheikh Muhammad) had to be waterboarded a whopping 266 times says something wasn't working. Also, he argued against this consistently to - keep the US safe - why abandon it to prove a point?)

Here is my posting on how ineffective torture is.

Philip Zelikow (one of Condi's old advisors, who wrote a memo objecting to the torture memos while in the Bush administration, has been spekaing out about the inner dealings on torture in past days. He gave an informative interview on Rachel Maddow Tuesday night and something he said this morning on NPR stuck with me: When asked how would respond to statements that these torture methods were effective, Zelikow said its not about whether the torture was effective - its about whether it could have been acquired in other ways. Other methods - incentives, cooption - have been effective in the past and might have been effective here.

Open Door Policy 2009: Not like 20th Century imperialism in China; like anti-terrorism torture team, 2009.

I just have to comment on how many times I have heard this phrase on the radio "Obama leaves door open to prosecution..."

Bye Bye Byebee part deux!

Wow, looks like Judge Jay might be waving good Byebee to more than his seat on the bench!

An article today in the Wash Post states Obama is open to a probe of investigations of top officials over torture.

"President Obama today defended his opposition to prosecuting CIA employees who conducted harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects but left open the possibility that officials who approved the techniques could face legal liability."

Bye bye byebee.

I encourage everyone to sign this petition to impeach Judge Jay Bybee, a torture lover. He is one of the Bush admin's lawyers who wrote the memos 'justifying' the use of torture.

You can read his memos, and those of fellow members of his torture gang - Yoo et al, here. His is from March 13th and June 8th.